Provenance in personal documentary: My Mother's Village

Abstract

My Mother's Village is a personal documentary response to The Sri Lanka Series (1980), a series of ethnographic films produced by the author's anthropologist mother, Sharon Bell, and filmmaker father, Geoff Burton. Four women, a community of fishermen, and a dance instructor were the 'subjects' of their three films. The feature length film My Mother's Village revisits the same participants in Sri Lanka and pursues the original themes and issues, such as economic conditions, the status of women, colonialism, religion, ritual, and inter-generational change. My Mother's Village explores how both the filmmaker and participants are navigating heredity and inheritance.

Supplementing the film, the exegesis component, Provenance in Personal Documentary interrogates the conceptual underpinnings of the creative research. 'Provenance', the key concept informing the production of My Mother's Village is a fine art term specifically â repractisedâ and retheorised here. It is hypothesised that cross-disciplinary personal documentary production is a fertile environment that responds to increasingly accessible technologies and progressive interpretations of what contemporary â documentaryâ means. This research project responds to the lack of a critical framework for interpreting and developing inter-disciplinary documentary praxis. The experimental methods employed in the provenance of My Mother's Village extend to the adoption of an auto-ethnographic and autobiographical mode of storytelling in this exegesis. This marriage of creativity and scholarly research is further reflected in the relationship between the exegesis and corresponding personal documentary film production.

The provenance of My Mother's Village reveals an historical convergence of 20th century documentary traditions of photography, cinema, and visual ethnography. The convergence of these traditions in the contemporary art context echoes Walter Benjamin's observations of the shifting nature of art in the 20th century. Provenance, in Benjamin's revolutionary context, transgresses the 'aura', market valuation, and ownership of art objects to a dynamic understanding of processes, intentions, and storytelling throughout artistic production. This investigation finds that personal documentary modes account for this shifting paradigm in visual arts and offer ethical and creative methodologies for inter-disciplinary visual research. In the current global technological landscape of data-streams and personal media devices, provenance encourages a sensuous topography of encounter, contingency, boredom, and experiment.